UK: Brexit and minorities

Brexitâ€™s unheard voices
Why is the diversity of the Leave vote ignored?

Rakib Ehsan

30 January 2019

The UK vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 was a huge shock for metropolitan sophisticates. Unfortunately, the media has fallen short in its attempts to explain how it came about.

Vox pops of Leave voters are too often restricted to white working-class folk in northern England and provincial towns across the Midlands. Regular venues are pubs and working menâ€™s clubs. Soundbites such as â€œmake Britain great againâ€ and â€œput the Great back in Great Britainâ€ are typical. As well as featuring on primetime TV, these segments are often used as digestible clips on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

But the coverage simply doesnâ€™t reflect the diversity of the Brexit vote. Not all Leave voters are white, left-behind people who live in de-industrialised â€˜hollowed-outâ€™ communities. Nor are they all dispossessed â€˜nativistsâ€™ longing for a bygone era of British territorialism and imperial might. This idea of Brexit as a â€œwhite working-class revoltâ€ â€“ an uprising of the nostalgic in stagnant regions abandoned by the London-centric political establishment â€“ is put about by the media, and there is some truth in it.

But there is much more to it, too. Why else, for example, would Milton Keynes, a new town commercial hub, and Watford, with its multi-ethnic population and Zone 7 London Underground station, vote Leave? Media portrayals barely begin to tell the story of why 17.4 million people voted to get out.

Data suggests that euroscepticism in Britainâ€™s South Asian population â€“ particularly the UKâ€™s Indian ethnic group â€“ is stronger than previously thought. Look at Osterley and Spring Grove. A relatively affluent, non-white-majority ward in the west London borough of Hounslow, it returned a Leave vote of 63.4%. Defying the wider national trend, non-white ethnicity was associated with voting Leave in the two multi-ethnic west London boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing.

A number of jurisdictions with large South Asian populations also delivered Leave votes, including Luton (56.5%), Hillingdon (56.4%), Slough (54.3%) and Bradford (54.2%). All have South Asian populations of 25% and above. It is fair to assume that these figures relied on healthy support for Brexit among voters of South Asian origin.

I wonder if political journalists and correspondents are aware of these voting patterns. If so, where are the vox pops with first-generation South Asian elders in Luton and Slough? How many economically secure west Londoners of Indian origin have been asked by mainstream media outlets to articulate their desire for the UK to leave the EU?

Why did the home-owning, higher-status workers in Osterley, many of whose origins are in Gujarat and the Punjab, not vote in a way â€“ according to convention â€“ that their socio-economic class would predict? 1

Their views could add great value to the national coverage as to how the Leave vote came about â€“ which still seems to mystify many. London-based journalists donâ€™t need to visit working-menâ€™s clubs in the north and pubs in the provincial Midlands to find Brexit voters. They could look no further than the mandirs and gurdwaras in west London.

Osterley is a ten-minute drive from Sky News HQ, and comfortably under an hour from BBC Broadcasting House on the Tube. So why the myopia? Perhaps it is simply a case of the media being incredibly lax, not with their travel plans but with their research. Maybe the broad exclusion of South Asian Leavers is simply the result of ignorance.

The cynic in me wonders if this is the conceivably intentional no-platforming of non-white Brexit voters whose attitudes are at odds with the mediaâ€™s dominant narrative. Could it be an orchestrated effort that seeks to portray the Leave result as precipitated by nostalgic, left-behind, lesser-educated, misinformed white working-class folk â€“ low-resourced â€œsimpletonsâ€ driven by their irrational jingoistic impulses? In short, is it a Remain plot?

I would like to think not, but either way, the use of vox pops in â€˜Brexit Britainâ€™ shows that the media cannot be fully trusted to delve into why important political and social events, such as the Leave vote in June 2016, take place. The appetite for thorough investigation and reporting realities has increasingly given way to the peddling of simplistic narratives.

In the case of Brexit, the dominant media narratives fail spectacularly in capturing the complex nature of British euro-scepticism. Brexit has exposed an unfortunate reality â€“ that the mediaâ€™s commitment to reporting the facts, pure and simple, leaves a lot to be desired. And while this could be the product of bad journalism and poor research, there is also the possibility that that its â€˜research and informâ€™ function has been usurped by a role as â€˜narrative manufacturersâ€™. And thatâ€™s a big worry.

FOOTNOTES

1. Why did some South Asians vote for a campaign that was, at times, seen as bigoted and xenophobic? I have discussed various reasons here: perhaps voters didnâ€™t feel particularly European; or perhaps the Leave campâ€™s pro-Commonwealth rhetoric pulled hard on the heartstrings; or perhaps the supposedly xenophobic and racist elements of the Leave campaign just didnâ€™t offend many well-integrated, South Asian voters who strongly identify with the UK.

Flyover countryWhy does the Left sneer at the traditional working class?
Labour alienates this integral element at its peril

Paul Embery

05 April 2019

It was a straightforward political point. â€œLabour comes out in favour of keeping free movement â€“ an utter betrayal of traditional working-class people, the majority of whom oppose it and voted to end it in the referendum. The party will pay a heavy, but deserved, price for this at the ballot box.â€ This was my tweet after Labour had declared its support for the Common Market 2.0 proposal earlier this week.

Cue hordes of offendotrons, utterly certain that my use of the term â€œtraditionalâ€ was really a euphemism for â€œwhiteâ€ .

Leading the charge was â€˜literal communistâ€™ Ash Sarkar, who fulminated:

My critics were, of course, unwittingly betraying their own deep prejudice. Did they really believe that the term â€˜traditional working classâ€™ by definition excluded all those without white skin â€“ such as, say, the thousands of Commonwealth immigrants who arrived here over half a century ago and found work in manual industries or our public services? Apparently they did.

Itâ€™s true that the term is not especially tightly defined. Nonetheless, so extensively has it been used over the years in political discourse and throughout the media â€“ including by Left-wingers such as the Guardianâ€™s Owen Jones â€“ as well as wider society, it is fair to argue that it is broadly understood to refer to that social group which is older; often politically tribal; either currently or at least once employed in blue-collar labour; and usually located in the post-industrial areas of Britain, though prevalent in rural and coastal communities too.

This group is rooted, patriotic, communitarian in outlook, often holding small â€˜câ€™ conservative views on social and cultural issues. As with all social classes in the UK, it is mainly white, but certainly not exclusively so.

The results of a BBC class survey in 2013 showed that 9% of this group came from an ethnic minority background, only slightly lower than the total percentage of the UKâ€™s ethnic minority population at the time.

So what level of audacity does it take to suggest that these individuals do not in fact qualify for membership of this social group by dint of their colour? Consider the inspiring Asian women of the 1970s Grunwick dispute, or the black activists who organised the Bristol bus boycott in 1963, or the other historical struggles in which ethnic minority campaigners have played a key role. What are these workers and activists if not part of our traditional working class?

It is certainly true that these struggles were shunned by some sections of the working-class at the time. In the case of the Bristol bus boycott, the Transport and General Workersâ€™ Union was shamefully complicit in discriminating against black drivers â€“ but that doesnâ€™t make those engaged in the struggle any less a part of the traditional working class, nor does it mean that we should join the efforts to exclude them from it.

I dare my opponents to speak to my own in-laws, who landed in Britain on a plane from Calcutta back in the 1960s. My late father-in-law, a deckhand in the Indian Merchant Navy as a young man, spent the rest of his working life in the UK as a sheet metal worker and raised his family in a council home in pre-gentrification Hackney. Tell any of them that they do not meet the criteria for membership of Britainâ€™s traditional working-class, and youâ€™d get short shrift.

When some on the Left argue that the term â€˜traditional working-classâ€™ is obscure or divisive or racist and should therefore be ditched, what they are really demonstrating, unintentionally, is their own hidden contempt for this group. They would rather it didnâ€™t exist at all in the form it does.

They think its members are â€˜nativistâ€™ and reactionary and â€“ God forbid â€“ voted to leave the European Union. Because, you see, the group-thinkers and virtue-signallers and woke liberals and quasi-Marxists and echo-chamber-dwellers who comprise so much of the modern Left believe themselves to be Inherently Better People than those of us from the more traditional Left. We are Gillian Duffy and White Van Man of Rochester â€“ ripe for votes, but not fit to be seen in public with.

It is this patronising mindset that compels them to assume that ethnic minority voters cannot possibly be in favour of Brexit or opposed to free movement. Yet research shows that around a third of ethnic minority voters supported Leave, and that many of these, particularly the older generation, were hostile to free movement, not least because they considered it unfair that prospective migrants from outside the EU â€“ in many cases, people like themselves â€“ faced bigger hurdles in coming to the UK than did those from inside it.

Sure, the working class is forever altering, and it is fair to argue that the traditional working class isnâ€™t necessarily representative of the working-class generally. Indeed, a consequence of our rapidly-changing economy and society over recent years â€“ and the subject of an insightful book by Claire Ainsley â€“ has been the emergence of a new working class.

This group is younger, heavily represented in the service sector, often in precarious employment and on a low income, less politically tribal and more culturally diverse. It is unquestionably an integral part of todayâ€™s working class and should command the attention of those of us in the labour movement.

But, in electoral terms, Labour already has much of this vote in the bag. It is also true to say that this new working class is not as marginalised or ostracised politically, socially or culturally to the same degree as is the traditional working class, and it is thus the latter whom Labour should be moving heaven and Earth to reconnect with.

Labour has haemorrhaged support among the traditional working class in recent years. In the 2017 general election, there was a swing to the Tories in some of its post-industrial heartlands of the north and Midlands, and the party lost working-class strongholds such as Stoke-on-Trent South, Mansfield and Walsall North. Post-election polling even saw the Tories take a lead among the working-class C2DEs. Sixty-one per cent of Labour constituencies voted Leave, as did 35 of the 45 seats in England and Wales which Labour must take if it is to win an election.

At a time when the traditional working class has never felt so disillusioned with Labour, the partyâ€™s support for policies such as free movement, which did so much to alienate this group in the first place, will do nothing to win them back. Whatever their skin colour.